1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to snack food products and, more particularly, to a novel fried snack chip made from a dough preform with discontinuous areas of highly cohesive and less cohesive dough compositions. A novel texture and appearance are apparent in the finished fried snack as a result of the discontinuous internal structure of the snack.
2. Description of the Prior Art
There have been a number of prior art techniques used to achieve unique appearance and structure of fried snack food products. U.S. Pat. No. 4,994,295 to Holm et al., assigned to the same assignee as the present invention, discloses products having unique textures and processes to control the size and quantity of surface bubbling of the chips when they are fried. These snack products are made, however, from a uniform well-mixed dough; therefore, differences in texture that would be perceived are simply due to differences in thicknesses between bubbled and unbubbled sections of the fried snack product. This type of bubbling has been noted in potato chips made from thinly sliced raw potatoes.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,259,503 to Tan describes a starch-containing dough mixture and discrete pieces or particles of a foodstuff completely foreign to the dough substrate. These ingredients are made into a dried snack pellet by means known to the art, after which the dried pellet can be fried to make a puffed, highly expanded snack product. As the result of the particles throughout, the fried chips have an irregular shape with a tendency to curl. The cited particles, such as nuts, however, have a texture and appearance totally foreign to the surrounding dough matrix.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,752,493 to Moriki describes hollow expanded snacks made from a sheeted dough comprising a combination of a highly expanding ingredient and a lower swelling capacity ingredient. Hot water is added to the dry ingredients which are mixed and kneaded into a completely homogenous dough which is sheeted and cut into small shaped units which are baked so that steam forms inside the two surface areas of the snack during frying.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,110,613 to Brown et al. discloses a method to prepare snack chips from a dry starch material mixed with a moist starch dough to produce a chip having a variation in texture. However, Brown et al. does not disclose a composite dough comprising of components with a high and a low specifically controlled degrees of cohesiveness. The dry starch material is not hydrated into a dough of different consistency from the matrix dough and hence can scorch during frying or baking.
Accordingly it would be desirable to create a composite dough which, when sheeted and fried, would exhibit randomly distributed areas of discontinuous phases having differences in texture and appearance and without the tendency for scorching during baking or frying.